About Total Integration

Neil Scott's Weekly Letter to the World 2022-2023

Total Integration was a weekly newsletter about whatever I had been thinking about in the previous seven days.

On the web, it helps to be legible to others. It’s difficult to have an audience when people don’t know where you fit into their lives. I have written previously about finding your thing and still hold out hope of cultivating a life project. Until then I am going to stay curious. Everyone should have a space where they have the freedom to follow their thoughts wherever they lead.

My projects for 2024 are The Crop and The WIP.

Total Integration Archives

The Substack archives can be slow to load, so here is a chronological list of all the posts on the site.

2023

• Why are Glasgow’s buses so bad?

• Forget Pronouns, Tell Me Your Nouns

• On Pain

• The Design of Trophies

• Chatbot Dystopia

• The Side Project is Dead, Long Live The Side Project

• Remembering The Future

• The White Hair

• Nietzsche and Photography

• Things I found interesting in February 2023

• Caught Between

• Hopeless

• In Praise of Scarcity

• On Bringing Projects to an End

• Diary: BUZZCUT Festival 2023

• From Ideas to Ideology

• Review: How to Blow Up a Pipeline

• The Photographer’s Eye

• Finding the Mind’s Construction in an Interview

• The Information Diet

• Things I found interesting in May 2023

• Team Amis

• Should I stop writing blog posts and just edit Wikipedia?

• Book Review: Porn – An Oral History

• An experiment in Experimental Art Writing

• Existential Productivity

• How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Like Graffiti

• 7 Thoughts on UX Scotland 2023

• Notes Towards a Successful Photo Essay

• Pub Quizology

• Unravelling the Threads

• Rejecting Audience Capture

• The Futile Search for the Perfect Routine

• An Idiot's Guide to Yoga

• Zero Offspring Behaviour

• Things I Found Interesting in August 2023

• Photosketches of Spain

• Book Review: O Brother by John Niven

• 5 Psychogeographical Experiments To See the City Anew

• Interview with Rachel Maclean

• Book Review: Always Open Always Closed by Caitlin Merrett King

• Interview with FK Alexander

• An Interview with photographer Simon Murphy

• Straitened/Straightened

• Only Connect

• Book review: All Desire is a Desire for Being by René Girard

• Notes on Class and Art

• One Hundred Weeks of Total Integration

• Robinson and The Problem of Glasgow

• The Year in Photos: 2023

• Books of the Year 2023

• Films of the Year 2023

• The Year of Submission

• The Years in Photos

2022

Introduction to the 2022 year-long challenge

Writing helps bring clarity to your thoughts. Every morning I write about whatever I’ve been thinking about in the previous 24 hours. These writings are generally archived in a private journal never to be seen again.

This year I want to get extra clarity by publishing these writings. The idea is that by having ‘skin in the game’, by exposing my thoughts to the world, I will be forced to ask: is this actually true?

In order to provide some incentive to follow through, I have committed to publishing a letter to the world, every Saturday, for 2022. There is the discipline in a weekly deadline combined with time and space in which to complete it.

• Nine photos from 2021

• Year-long projects

• Year-long projects with Ellie Harrison

• Principles for health

• Why we should all drink kefir

• Reflections on time well spent

• The uses and disadvantages of website archiving for life

• Comedic Decoupling

• Alcohol: a love story

• 250 Parkruns Later

• 250 Parkruns Later with David Barnett

• The LiveJournal Moment

• On Mockingbird by Walter Tevis

• Photographic Fomites

• What's your thing?

• What's your thing? with Laura González

• The All-inclusive Aristocrat

• The Trade-off Mindset

• Waves, rocks, and turning points

• Nir Eyal vs Johann Hari

• Reacting to Nir Eyal vs Johann Hari

• In Defence of Broscience

• What happened to Glasgow's visionaries?

• Following Through

• Why you should get married

• Total Integration

• Total Integration with S

• Entering the Neil Scott multiverse

• Whatever happened to Oliver Braid?

• Whatever happened to Oliver Braid ... with Oliver Braid

• Split Ticketing and the Preston Model

• Halfway

• Surrendering to the Algorithm

• On Scenius

• The Book Group

• All you need is …

• The Alienating Affect of Effective Altruism

• The Pivot to Video

• The Hedgehog and The Fox go to a Yoga Retreat

• Escapism and Escapology in Jack Reacher

• Phenomenology of Social Media

• Amor Fati

• The Ethics of Street Photography

• Interview with Alan Dimmick

• Drawing the Line

• 95 Theses on Cool: Parts 0 to 17

• Expansion and Contraction

• Integrity and the Critic

• Reading Discipline

• Interview with Camilla Grudova

• Mannequins

• The Size of Thoughts

• Master of my Domains

• Unclear Fallout

• What if I was wrong

• Things I found interesting in November

• The End of the World as We Know It

• Interview with Ewan Morrison

• 2022: The Year in Photos

• A Year of Weekly Writing

As well as writing a weekly blog for 2022, I also started republishing some of my older articles.

New Escapologist

• The Marshmallow Liberation

• Escaping your possessions

• The Anti-Cliché Manifesto

• Escape Depression

• Escaping Distractions

• How to Rewrite Your Script

• The Bohemian Beard Experiment

• Bohemianism and Entropy

• The Sulking Ape

• How to Make Decisions Like Steve Jobs

• Drawing the line: an essay on integrity

• Notes towards becoming a good citizen

• Escape Thought

• How to think about ‘How to Change the World’ in a World of Wicked Problems

• Numbers

• Practical interventions to make life less absurd

• The Absurdity of Utopia: An Interview with Ewan Morrison

• Imagining Russell Brand’s Revolution

• Thoughtspasms of the Posthumous Trudger

• Outsiders Against Competition

• Everything I've learnt about happiness and productivity in the last ten years

• The Essence of Eudaemonology

The Mind’s Construction

• Interview: Patrick Wolf

• Interview with Felipe Fernández-Armesto

• Interviews Bid from the Monochrome Set

• Interview: Dickon Edwards

• Interview: Franz Ferdinand

• Interview: Jeffrey Lewis

• Interview: Dan Rhodes

• Interview: Adam Green

• Interview: Stewart Home

• Interview: Simon Bookish

• Interview: Pat Kane

• Interview: Momus

• Interview: Bryn Phillips

• Interview: Jamie Manners